everybody it's Kristianna Mrjenovich your second chance queen and welcome to the very first episode of the second chance queen podcast. I'm super excited to be launching this podcast not only as a way to tell my story but as a way for other women to use this as a platform to tell their stories. So I'm going to be telling my story on this very first episode second chance queen who?
And then in the coming weeks, I will be interviewing some amazing, powerful women that are going to share their stories. Now this podcast is all about second chances. My personal second chance is starting my life over after leaving a domestic abuse situation. Other women's second chances, they may look a little bit different, but this is the Second Chance platform.
So if you have given or received a second chance, then this is the podcast for feel like it's appropriate to talk a little bit about who am I? The Second Chance Queen. I am a mother of three. I have two incredible boys and a daughter that I recently had with my new husband, newer husband. am a business owner. I'm president of a property management firm and a vice president with my husband and I's leather working embroidery business.
So I'm a two time entrepreneur and I am also a wife, obviously, a friend, a daughter, one of the biggest aspects about me is I am a domestic abuse advocate. I'm a survivor. I'm an advocate. and I'm huge on promoting confidence in young girls because this is a day and age where confidence is something you really have to have. So that's where I am at. That's who I am. I love sharing my story.
I've had a couple women come forward and say that hearing my story inspired them to leave domestic abuse situations and to give themselves a second chance at the life that they always wanted. So I'm hoping with this podcast, I'm able to reach at least one woman who's in the throes of a domestic abuse situation that is finally ready to say enough is enough and to take that final step. Because by sharing my story and my testimony, I can show you, you absolutely can do it.
So for the rest of this story, I'm going to take this off because these things can get a little Crown off, bun up. That's the best way to tell stories. now that you know a little bit about me, I'm going to start from the very beginning with my story. So this is going to be your trigger warning for anybody that is upset by domestic abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, sexual abuse, rape. If those things are something that you're not comfortable hearing about.
And then I'm going to urge you now that this podcast might not be for you or at least this episode I'm going to be sharing my story that does have those sensitive subjects in it. So you have been warned. Proceed with My story starts back in 2010. was 17 years old. I was still in high school and I was in a two year long relationship from 2010 to 2012 a man that was older than I was. He graduated several years ahead of me.
He was even held back, so he was older than And he was a very terrible person. The entirety of our two year relationship, he used coercion, manipulation to sexually abuse me. Not gonna go into the details of everything that he did to me because that doesn't need to be shared. But those two years were, they shaped a lot of what I thought love was and what I thought relationships were.
So my introduction to adulthood and relationships involved sex being a chore, sex being a job, sex being an obligation, sex being something that you had to do for your partner. Didn't matter if you liked it, didn't like it. didn't want to do certain things, you had to do those things because that was your job and if you didn't do they were going to leave you and they were going to replace you or they were going to cheat on you. So that was my introduction to relationships.
It was not a very good introduction to relationships and I will do my damnedest to make sure that my daughter does not have that introduction into relationships. But that is what I experienced. So there was a lot of sexual My most traumatic experience occurred in that two year time span and I'm going to share this because it does play into the future as And one night when I was in that relationship, he abused prescription drugs that interacted badly with himself He got extremely violent.
He was threatening to kill me. He was threatening to kill my family because we lived with family at the time. And I was terrified. So I hid his weapon and barricaded it in a closet so that he could not do the things that he was threatening to do. And he was so out of his mind that I was able to kind of distract him away from and keep it in the decided that the best way to distract himself was going to be by raping assaulted me.
And I remember thinking, there's no way this is happening to me right now because This is my boyfriend. I've been in a relationship with him. You know, I didn't realize all of the red flags at the time. So I just remember thinking, there's no way this is happening to me right now. I was hysterical. I was sobbing. I was looking into his eyes and they were just black. There was nothing in them. He was looking at me in the face and no reaction. I made it through that night.
The next day he had no recollection of what happened. And I said, do you remember what happened last night? He didn't. So I told him the story and kind of what took place. And his response, I'll never forget, was, sounds like I had a really good night. And I remember thinking, there's no way. of this person just responded this way to me.
But he that was one of the first red flags that really stuck off him in my mind, because I remember thinking someone that loves you should not be thinking, I had a good night because I assaulted my girlfriend. that was. Toward the end of our relationship, we didn't break up immediately after that. He gaslit me about the event. He didn't remember it, but he controlled the narrative.
He convinced me that I was overreacting, that if you're in a relationship with somebody, they can't assault you or they can't rape you because you're in a relationship with them. That is something that I really want people to know is that coercion is not consent. and that relationships do not entitle you to anything because I did not realize as a young naive girl that he was wrong. And it took a long time for me to realize that he was wrong.
So I share that part of my story so that other women can realize it does not matter if it's your husband, it does not matter if it's your boyfriend, it doesn't matter if you've said yes, but now you say no. Rape is not what you see on Law and Order SVU. It's not always strangers. It's not always a violent beat down assault. It can, yeah, absolutely. And I'm not invalidating those attacks by any means. But rape can also look much different.
And sexual assault can look much different than what you see on TV and the So that occurred in probably 2011, early 2012. was young and naive, and we got married. our marriage did not last more than six months. We wound up getting divorced.
We went to marriage counseling and on the second session of counseling, the therapist was like, this is not gonna change for I said I wanted a divorce and I realized that he did not mind that because he already had been cheating with somebody else at this point and had his next person lined up. So we finalized our divorce and he hopped into the next relationship in the fall of 2012. That was the end of that. Or so I thought.
wound up meeting my second husband while my divorce was in the process of being finalized. I've moved very quickly. I've realized that that is a huge personality flaw with me and not something that I recommend. Don't try that at home. But that is something about me that I definitely have realized is that I move very quickly. And I met this man and he was only a couple of years older than me. And he was much different than my ex -husband was. So I thought, okay, different is better.
Different is not always better. And I learned I was in that relationship for eight years. So from 2012 to 2020, I was in that relationship. We were together for four years and then married in four years after that. And that relationship was an entirely different situation. It was, it had its own set of issues. He was never physical with but emotionally I underwent abuse in that relationship. I was always taking care of the kids, the house, literally everything.
and he worked and I worked as well and that dynamic I thought worked for me. for a really long But hindsight is 20 -20. And that relationship, I'm not gonna go into as much detail with that relationship, not out of respect for my abuser, but out of respect for my boys, because I have my two boys who are now almost 10 and five, and that is their father.
And I want to let them find out about their father in their own time when they're that relationship was littered with emotional abuse, controlling. There were things like not being able to order groceries delivered to my house because he didn't like delivery people in the height of COVID. I was out grocery shopping with the kids in public because he would rather I go grocery shopping with the kids in public than have groceries delivered to the house.
So there was just a whole different set of dynamic issues. There was a lot of cheating in that not going to go into details about that, but I found out more and more and more as time went That is something that I sincerely hope that he has addressed and moved on from. But that's a part of my story. And so it is what it But it left me with a lot of trust So I was in this relationship that was emotionally abusive. I was cheated on constantly and I just did not have a healthy version of love.
got to the breaking point for me when my almost 10 year old was about five at the one day I was crying and He said, I'm sorry you're crying mommy or I'm sorry you're upset mommy. I said, it's okay buddy, it's not your fault. That was my default answer. And he said, I know, it's daddy's. Daddy always makes you cry. and a light bulb went off in that moment for me that my god this is the example of love that my kids are learning and that is absolutely not okay with me.
I knew I had to break that cycle because he grew up in a broken household and his version of love was from those parents. And I thought fighting to stay together was gonna solve that. And I never, no one ever imagines raising kids in a broken home. So I thought, no, I grew up with both my parents together and that's what I'm gonna give them. So I fought tooth and nail to stay until that moment. Hearing that, that was my son's example of love, was an instantaneous absolutely not.
My mental health was down the drain. I was suicidal. I was stuck in this really dark place. hearing that from my It was the kick that I needed. realized I had to change things. And if that relationship wasn't going to change, which we tried, we did counseling, he did counseling. It sometimes people are not compatible and that's No matter how much you want to be a version that somebody wants you to be, it's not natural for you, it's never going to work. It doesn't last.
You have to want to be who you are and want to be a certain person for it to work. And that relationship was just two people that were too different and it was not going to wound up getting into a huge fight in October of 2020. And I finally told him I wanted a divorce. had a lot of discussions, but that was what I felt was best. And so I started looking at apartments and I found one and I signed a lease on an apartment that was a low income apartment.
I was able to get a three bedroom apartment for me and the two boys. And I signed my lease the day before Thanksgiving in November of 2021 and got to go up to IKEA and get all new furniture and really start a new chapter for myself.
That was in November and with the holidays coming, I really wanted to give the boys a little bit of a sense of normalcy with moving into the apartment and getting them used to two homes and the did a lot of things together still as a family unit to try see what that was going to look like. And I had a conversation where I said, you know what, I'm not going to close the door, but I'm going to live in my apartment. I'm going to do my own thing.
If you want to try and earn your family back, then you can do that. But I'm going to do my own thing. I have things I need to heal from and things you need to work on and heal from. And I don't want to be there while you do it. You need to do it yourself and for yourself. Not for me, not for the kids, for you. went through the holidays like that. And then in January, we started fighting again. And so by mid and January, I said, I want a didn't wind up starting that process for a couple of weeks.
But in the meantime, I was making friends I had. you know, my girlfriends around me. I had a support system of I hosted girls nights. I talked to people. I downloaded TikTok and I would watch TikToks and I wound up watching a TikTok that would forever change my life in 2021, January, 2021. And it was about a girl who met the love of her life on Omegle.
I'm not gonna go into the huge story about how I met my husband because that is in episode two of this podcast so stay tuned for the next episode because you will hear straight out of our mouths how we met each other and our whirlwind of a love story but that is the night I met James was on Omegle and we rewrote history. So that was January end, very end of January 2021. started off as friends. I think as anybody does that is on Omegle or in that situation, you just need somebody to talk to.
And so we started off on Snapchat, just Snapchat friends. We'd send little videos back and forth. And it wound up developing. into a relationship pretty quickly. By February we realized that like this there could actually be something here and so we did long distance. I was in Florida and he was in Illinois until May 2021 and in May he moved down sight unseen all of his stuff in his GMC terrain to Florida and rest is history.
Two weeks later we got legally But the absolute best decision that I've ever here we are in July of 2024 Definitely make sure you watch episode two. We've been married three times. We had our incredible daughter, Nora, and we're now a family of five. He treats the boys like they're his very own kids and we love life. We built our dream house this year and January we closed on that and moved in and now doors opened.
When I was postpartum with Nora in May of 2023, I was in a really dark place and I needed something to bring me out. I remember looking up baby pageants and came across a pageant that I enrolled her in and they had a Mrs. Division and it sent me down a rabbit hole because I'm like, my gosh, I did pageants a couple of times when I was younger, didn't have a ton of success, but I loved them. And I wound up finding the pageant title that I held last year in 2023. I was Mrs. Colorado, USA Earth.
for when I really realized pageantry is where I want to I started my Can Queen initiative that is a recycling initiative and all of the funds that I collect from the can recycling are donated to nonprofit organizations, national and local nonprofit organizations. I've been focusing on domestic abuse and mental health nonprofits. in the recent months. So I started the Can Queen Initiative and I won the 2024 Iconic Impact Award for my work in that pageant system and for that project.
And I'm really proud of that. So that's ongoing. I still collect those cans. I still donate those funds. I've kind of realized that My heart is in mental health and domestic abuse awareness. And that's where I find myself focusing and really wanting to make a difference. I've had a couple people reach out on Messenger who have told me that sharing my story about meeting my husband and our happily ever after has encouraged them to... chase their dreams and give themselves a second chance.
And that's how the Second Chance Queen podcast idea kind of took root was that other women started coming forward to me saying, you sharing your story encouraged me to leave my marriage that I was not happy in or that I was being abused in. And I've met the love of my life and I'm living the dream.
And so this idea was I'm going to use this platform to share those stories, to interview women that have been in the same situation that I've been in, and to make it more widespread, not just domestic abuse or, you know, leaving, but also second chances in general, because A second chance is a really beautiful thing. You can be at the darkest point in your life thinking that it's never gonna get better. And I'm living proof that it does get better if you give yourself that second chance.
don't know what life is gonna look like in a week. But give yourself a second chance for tomorrow. because you never know what can happen in a day. I hope that you continue to follow along and hear all of the exciting things that I have planned. Just a couple of weeks ago, I walked in Miami Fashion Week as a plus size model. I am getting ready to commit to New York Fashion Week in February of 2025. I have a super secret project with the Girl Scouts in my area that I'm super excited about.
And I'm hoping that the second chance that I gave myself can continue to growl into something beautiful for my kids and my daughter. And also for the women that don't think that it gets better or that they can do better because you absolutely can. I am a plus size woman that is now a pageant queen.
I'm competing for International Ms in September of this year and I'm hoping to show just how powerful a second chance can I hope you enjoyed this episode and stay tuned for episode two lobster of my life and I can't wait to share this with